Presentations are an important aspect of many professional and social settings. Executives make presentations to directors, managers conduct meetings with staff, salespersons make presentations to potential customers, doctors conduct meetings with nurses and patients, lawyers make presentations to juries, and families and friends present and share photographs of occasions in their lives.
Frequently, much effort goes into generating and delivering effective presentations. With specialized software, conventional personal computer systems can provide effective platforms for generating and conducting presentations. Currently available presentation program modules can turn a personal computer into a customized presentation system for generating and delivering picture presentations using display terminals or digital projectors.
Generally described, these prior art presentation systems provide a specially designed, user-friendly, set of tools to assist in the construction of a presentation that can be displayed subsequently to an audience. Those presentation systems also allow images to be presented sequentially to an audience, picture-by-picture, with color, animation, audio, and transition effects that enrich and enliven the presentation.
Conventional presentation systems do not provide an effective means for interacting with the content of the presentation during the course of the presentation. This drawback arises because these conventional presentation systems have only two modes of operation, an edit mode and a show mode. A single user often constructs the presentation, and a single user delivers the presentation to an audience. During the course of the presentation, the single user can interact with the content of the presentation only by invoking the edit mode, which primarily allows the user to rearrange the order in which the presentation is arranged.
A significant drawback arises when using these conventional presentation systems because all other participants of the presentation cannot concurrently interact with the content of the presentation.
Conventional systems are designed for use by a single presenter to a passive audience, and not for a setting where all participants of the presentation interact with the presentation on an equal footing. The prior art presentation is typically conducted in a linear setting. The presenter faces the audience, and the audience views the presentation behind the presenter. The presenter can either look at the audience or the presentation, but not at both at the same time.
Furthermore, a conventional presentation system only has a single set of controls. To allow any one other than the presenter to control the presentation can be quite disruptive and cumbersome. Also, most computer implemented presentation systems that concurrently display multiple images use the same rectangular format as used by mechanical slide-sorter. Those require that the typical single user has a specific orientation with respect to the displayed presentation. These types of systems are not suited for situations where multiple participants are facing each other and the displayed presentation, in a highly interactive and multi-dimensional manner.
An alternative presentation system can use a circular display surface, such as a tabletop. There are many advantages of tabletop displays over traditional presentation systems, such as white boards, projection screen, desktops computers, or handheld devices, particularly for collaborative tasks where multiple users need to both work with each other and access computer resources.
Users can sit around a table and thus easily face each other, rather than try to crowd around a computer screen, or a small handheld device. A tabletop provides shared space and also allows users to have their own personal, if not entirely private, space to work on. Finally, whether it is an electronic display or not, a tabletop affords a convenient space where users can spread out and organize images.
Recently, a number of alternative display systems have been described, see for example: Wellner P., “The DigitalDesk Calculator: Tangible Manipulation on a Desk Top Display,” Proceedings of UIST '91, ACM Press, pp. 27-33, November 1991; Wellner P., “Interacting with Paper on the DigitalDesk,” Comm. ACM Vol. 36, 7, pp. 86-96, 1993; Streitz, N. et al. “i-LAND: An Interactive Landscape for Creativity and Innovation,” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'99), pp. 120-127, 1999; Prante, T., Muller-Tomfelde, C., Streitz, N., Steinmetz, R., “ConnecTables: Dynamic Coupling of Displays for the Flexible Creation of Shared Workspace,” Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'01), November, 2001; and Guimbretiere, F., Stone, M., Winograd, T., “Fluid Interaction with High-resolution Wall-size Displays,” Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'01), November, 2001.
The DigitalDesk is a physical desk augmented with vision and projector capabilities so that the physical and electronic desktops are merged into one. DigitalDesk is designed for a single user. The InteracTable in the i-Land project provides a rectangular surface for multiple users. However, most of these tabletop user interfaces organize images in a rectangular manner. It is desired to provide a circular graphical user interface.
Collaborative circular graphical user interfaces present special problems, which cannot be addressed by conventional event-driven “window” architectures, such as Microsoft Windows™, where a single “desktop” interface is entirely constrained by Cartesian coordinates, and a single user. The problems with circular graphical interfaces stem from three unique characteristics of a collaborative user interface that is circular and is on a tabletop.
First, polar locations and polar orientations of displayed icons, documents, and images, generally “items,” must be handled in a special way that is different from conventional rectangular formats.
Second, the number and variety of items that can be displayed is much larger than one would normally find on the traditional “desktop.” Also, the items can be organized in multiple layers and views associated with concurrent users.
Third, events that drive the interface originate from collaborations between the multiple users. None of these issues are addressed by conventional windows-based architectures.